Apple has said that it’s not on every device, and while that might be true, it’s probably running for a lot of us. If you have Diagnostics & Usage turned on, then it is running on your iPhone (that’s how Apple dances around it, iOS 5 asks if you want to turn it on).

How do you turn off Carrier IQ? It’s very easy on the iPhone:

Open Settings

Go to Location Services

Scroll to the bottom and go to System Services

Turn Diagnostics & Usage off

It sucks that Carrier IQ is on our iPhones, but it’s nice that we can turn it off

Yesterday I found out that my website had been hacked. Not only that, but it had been hacked months ago, and I hadn’t even noticed. How did this happen?

I only found out about it because somebody was kind enough to email me to let me know that they saw this on Google

Even the best of us get hacked when we use any “standardized” platform (Windows, OS X, WordPress, Drupal, etc.).

What is WSO? It’s an environment hackers can upload to your server when they find a vulnerability, and use it to access everything on your site. When you’ve been hacked, this is the payload that a hacker wants delivered. It could site dormant for months before being activated. Ever hear about those “Zombie Computers”? WSO is like a bite from a zombie, it can transform your website into anything they want at any time, all they have to do is wake it up.

Did Alex make any mistakes? Maybe … he should have been aware of the TimThumb vulnerability, as most WordPress developers were. Is it his fault? Not really.

We all add them, the “Google Analytics” and ad network tags to our sites. Anytime you paste a script from another site (including Facebook) you are slowing down your page load time. Sure some of them are asynchronous, but it still slows your website down.

Thanks to our awesome GhostRank Panel volunteers, we can (as most of you know) monitor the internet and most of the 3rd party content on it. Out of the nearly 800 companies we watch, we pegged these guys as the ones that lag your browsing experience the most if you live in the USA. To this extent, we’ve dubbed them “Lagtags.” Yes, they’re not all tags – many of them are analytics scripts or widgets – but it just seems to fit.

Everything you add to your site isn’t free. Sure it’s easy to paste all those scripts to get functionality, but you need to know … you will pay in milliseconds.